Category Archives: Lifestyle

How’s the Weather with You?

Posted on 19 September 2013 by sheg4184

So here I am, settled back in the Philippines at last, after almost three months away. I left at the end of the Filipino summer, worn down to a cranky crisp by the heat and humidity, swearing never to return. … Continue reading →

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Massages and Mayhem

Posted on 3 June 2013 by sheg4184

Somewhere on Mindoro… I am lying naked as a chicken fillet on a butcher’s block, on top of a large black plastic garbag, peering through a hole in the bed to a pile of pebbles artistically arranged on the floor … Continue reading →

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Farewell Tea

Posted on 26 May 2013 by sheg4184

The bane of expat life is the constant ebb and flow of friends. Every year, about this time, I start deleting names from my cellphone, as a clutch of my old mates disperse to new postings, and the talk revolves … Continue reading →

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Mother’s Day in Manila: saccharine or sincere?

Posted on 14 May 2013 by sheg4184

…yet though you dance in living light, I am the earth, I am the root, I am the stem that fed the fruit, the link that joins you to the night. ~ Judith Wright from ‘Woman to Child’ This year … Continue reading →

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Home Help: a challenge and a joy

Posted on 30 April 2013 by sheg4184

As an Australian, the concept of household staff is a foreign one, and I constantly find myself bewildered by the presence in my life of a full-time driver and a part-time maid or ‘helper’ and all the unwritten rules and … Continue reading →

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Snow & Ice in Manila…

Posted on 1 April 2013 by sheg4184

The temperature is rising in Manila as summer looms, but in the newly renovated New World Hotel in Makati it was snowing in March! The annual Ball is ANZA’s largest event, and this year it had a new location. No … Continue reading →

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Where is home?

Posted on 28 March 2013 by sheg4184

Home is a place to live: a place of retreat, rest, comfort, refuge. It can be the house or the town or the country in which we grew up or feel we belong. Some cultures include nomadic people whose homes … Continue reading →

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Freedom

Posted on 20 March 2013 by sheg4184

As our teenage sons baulk at the various house rules we attempt to enforce, I grapple with the idea of them emerging into a world without parental control, and I often find myself contemplating the parenting of today compared with … Continue reading →

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Driving: More Fun in the Philippines!

Posted on 10 March 2013 by sheg4184

Recently we have started teaching our older son to drive. In Manila. I haven’t actively dissuaded him from learning to drive, but nor have I actively encouraged him. There are so few safe places to get him used to driving a … Continue reading →

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Departure Lounge

Posted on 2 February 2013 by sheg4184

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see … Continue reading →

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